On Thu 22 Feb 2024 at 13:49:54 (-0300), Marcelo Laia wrote: > Inspiron 5547 01 OCT. 2014 > > Some hardware details: > > - BIOS: > - Vendor: Dell Inc. > - Version: A13 > - Date: 05/27/2019 > - CPU: > - Product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz > - Memory: > - Size: 16GB
[ … ] > After unplugging the power cable, i.e., the battery is discharging: > > After a few seconds, the screen brightness is set to zero. The mouse > remains active, and I can use it for a few more seconds, when it > also becomes disabled. From then on, only the touchpad and internal > keyboard are functional. [ … ] > Any other suggestions? It seems to me that it's not related to > power, however, what is the specific list for energy-related issues? My advice would be to prepare for a day when you see nothing from the moment you switch it on. Here's a log of what happened with my Dell D430 laptop, purchased in 2008 as a stop-gap, acquired by me in 2009. First the battery packs: 2014-02-12 Large battery started to go bad. Charging light started constantly flashing a pattern: four yellows and a longer green. Apart from that, everything works ok: the battery stays at five lights, and the acpi variables all show sensible values. However, the battery discharges much more quickly than it should, particularly early on, so some cells probably don't work properly. 2015-03-29 Started to switch itself off when the power cable was disconnected. It appears that the battery is not actually connected to the computer when this happens. 2015-03-31 The large battery finally gave up. When the charge button is pressed, only LEDS 1, 3 and 5 light up, but flashing. Otherwise, dead. Disposed of the large battery in Best Buy's foyer and started using the small one. And the screen: 2011-10-21 Started to switch itself off unaccountably every so often. No freeze, no kernel panic, but just like holding down the power switch. It will have been running a while, and usually it happens when the machine or lid is moved. 2017-01-22 After a day or two of slight flickering in brightness, the screen blanked out a few times during the day. The machine was still running, and so X could be quit and restarted, and rebooted too. The screen would come back, but often disappear almost immediately, even while the Dell splash screen was being displayed at switch-on. It went away entirely the same day. 2018-06-19 After being depowered for a week, the battery capacity had fallen to 2%. However, on AC the screen started working again, though it just flickered a little all the time. Took the opportunity to demote Internal HDD to below USB and Optical Drive in the BIOS. Got about three minutes before it reverted. 2020-04-16 Started to crash, and eventually failed to boot. Obviously difficult to diagnose when there's no display at power-on, so scrapped. If you're wondering why I kept it so long, I could use an external monitor to display its X server screen, but neither the BIOS nor the console would work that way, so I had to type blind until I got into X. With a 30 second countdown, I could operate the Grub screen blind. I also managed to install buster in text mode by copying what I typed while installing on another PC at the same time. (I might have been able to clone jessie into the other partition, but that would have then required two dist-upgrades.) Cheers, David.
